The Customer Service Management Process: Quality and Consistency
The customer service management process is a crucial part of maintaining customer relationships. It helps businesses keep track of customer interactions, identify and resolve customer issues, and ensure quality and consistency in the customer experience.
By understanding the key points of contact in the customer service management process, businesses can ensure they are providing the best possible service to their customers while also improving their bottom line.
Let’s find out how the customer service management process works and how companies can refine the process to deliver better customer experiences.
How Does the Customer Service Management Process Work?
The customer service management process typically involves four critical points of contact or touchpoints:
- Receiving customer inquiries and requests
- Assigning customer requests to the appropriate team or individual
- Resolving customer issues
- Following up with customers after their issue has been resolved
At each of these touchpoints, it is important for businesses to maintain quality and consistency in their customer interactions. This can be achieved through effective communication, efficient processes, and a commitment to customer satisfaction.
How Is Customer Service Quality Measured?
Customer service isn’t intangible. Companies can measure the quality of their customer service using the following metrics:
- First contact resolution rate: This measures how often customer issues are resolved on the first contact. A high first contact resolution rate likely indicates efficient and effective customer service.
- Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): This measures how likely customers are to recommend a company’s products or services to others. A high customer satisfaction score can indicate customers are pleased with their experience and are more likely to return in the future.
- Average handle time: This measures the average amount of time it takes for customer service representatives to resolve an issue. A low average handle time may be an indicator of efficient customer service.
- Service Level Management: This vital part of an ITSM solution allows you to track key milestones with agreed business timescales. Are service level agreements being met with customers?
Proven Strategies for Maintaining Customer Service Quality
There are a number of proven strategies that businesses can leverage to maintain customer service quality. These include:
Offering Multiple Channels of Support
Customers should be able to contact businesses through a variety of channels, including phone, email, live chat, and social media. A recent survey found that live chat is the second-most popular channel for customer service communications behind telephone. By offering multiple channels of support, businesses can make it easy for customers to get in touch and resolve their issues quickly.
Self-service portals are another channel. Self-service not only provides a mechanism for customers to look for help themselves within a knowledge base, but allows them to track and review progress of open tickets, make updates on their situations, and ask questions.
Using Customer Feedback To Improve the Customer Experience
Businesses should regularly collect customer feedback and use it to make changes that improve the customer experience. Customer feedback can be collected through surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews.
Leaning on Proven CSM Frameworks
Industry standards exist for a reason, and customer service has industry standard frameworks such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) that can be applied to almost any individual business to improve their customer service workflow. By leaning on these tried-and-true methodologies, and software tools built to leverage them, businesses can achieve reliable results.
Implementing Quality Management Processes
Quality management processes help businesses ensure that they are consistently meeting customer expectations. These processes can involve setting SLAs and OLAs that are measurable, measuring performance against those standards, and taking corrective action when necessary.
Using a Customer Service Management Platform Can Help
Improving the quality of any customer service process depends on how well its operations are automated. A customer service management platform streamlines every aspect of customer service into one solution, offering the following features:
- Holistic View of Clients and Their Needs: Most tools provide a knowledge base that can store information that is commonly requested by customers, but the best tools organize this data in a way that gives any agent reviewing it a clear picture of each individual client, and the answers to any of their questions or concerns.
- Predictive Analytics and Reporting: Reporting tools track metrics like first contact resolution rate, average handle time, and customer satisfaction score. Quality software platforms are able to use this info to make businesses more predictive of the needs of future clients to avoid issues before they ever arise.
- Completely Customizable Workflows: Workflow management tools automate the assignment of customer requests to the appropriate customer service representative, but premium platforms offer the highest level of customizability to ensure that every business can tweak the tool to meet their needs.
Vivantio Can Help You Streamline the Customer Service Management Process
Overall, using a customer service management platform helps companies refine their operations, retain customers, and improve their bottom line. If you want to create more quality and consistency in your customer service operations, Vivantio can help.
Vivantio is an intuitive customer service management platform that gives customer service representatives the tools they need to reach customers across different touchpoints and automate the assistance process.
